Thursday, September 13, 2012

Intoxicated by a cocktail of power and entitlement

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 12.)

The partial privatisation of state assets, the flagship
policy of the National-led government’s second term in office, is looking like
a train wreck.

For this, National must shoulder a large part of the blame.
Even when the MOM (“mixed ownership model”) emerged as the defining issue in
last year’s election, National failed to sell the policy to voters.

Granted, it was never likely to excite political passion,
other than from opponents; but still, the government could have done a lot more
to explain why and how the country was going to benefit.

Thus, although prime minister John Key could reject calls for a
referendum by insisting National won the biggest referendum of all (“it’s
called an election”), public support for the proposal never seemed more than
lukewarm.

Even as the deadline for the float of shares in Mighty River
Power neared, vital details such as how shares would be allocated – and how the
government would ensure they ended up in the hands of New Zealand mums and dads
rather than foreign corporate interests – still seemed vague. “Half-cocked”
barely begins to describe it.

Perhaps more damningly, the government appears not to have
anticipated the Maori Council’s application to the Waitangi Tribunal to block
the sale. That they didn’t see it coming suggests National placed too much
faith in its cosy relationship with the iwi leadership group, which represents
the Maori tribal elite.

Presumably the government thought any Treaty issues could be
resolved with iwi leaders behind closed doors, as has become the pattern.
Inevitably this would have involved guaranteeing iwi some sort of preferential
treatment when shares were allocated.

But in the background, a power struggle was bubbling away
within Maoridom. The long-quiescent Maori Council, resentful at being
supplanted by the iwi leadership group as the supposed voice of Maoridom,
decided to reassert itself and did so spectacularly, by shoving a stick in the
government’s spokes.

Mr Key was justified in calling the council’s action
opportunistic, yet it should have come as no surprise. It was entirely
predictable that the Maori Council – a statutory body created to advise the government
on Maori issues, and which purports to represent all Maori, not merely the
wealthy tribes – should feel irritated at being usurped by the iwi leadership
group, which has no status in law.

That’s not to say the motives of the Maori Council are pure,
because I don’t believe they are. But we can come back to that issue later.

The net effect of the council’s action and the Waitangi
Tribunal’s decision in its favour is to create doubt and uncertainty around the
asset sales. That has the potential to greatly reduce the value of the assets,
since investors don’t like uncertainty.

As if that weren’t enough, other factors largely outside the
government’s control have contrived to take the shine off the asset sales
programme.

Solid Energy, another of the state companies lined up for
partial sale, recently reported a $40 million loss and is talking job losses
and mine closures.

More worrying still is the uncertainty over the Tiwai Point
aluminium smelter, New Zealand’s biggest electricity user and the key customer
of another state company being lined up for sale, Meridian Energy. Tiwai
Point’s owners want to review their electricity contract because of falling
demand for aluminium, with potentially serious implications not just for Meridian’s
profits but for power prices generally.

And just to prove that problems come in threes, another big
electricity consumer, newsprint manufacturer Norske Skog, is planning to halve
production at its Kawerau newsprint mill. That will have an impact on Mighty
River Power’s books and add to a looming electricity surplus.

Given all these factors, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy
for Finance Minister Bill English. The continuing convulsions caused by the
global financial crisis are making National’s showpiece economic policy look
less attractive with every passing day.

Yet as problematical as these issues are, they are minor
compared with the massive challenge looming in the background, and which the
government shows no inclination to confront. This relates to fundamental
questions about who governs New Zealand, and for whose benefit.

The Maori Council’s challenge over water rights is
symptomatic of a much wider grab-a-thon in which “Maori” interests are
aggressively asserting rights to assets and resources with little regard for
the common good.

Tribes are almost falling over each other in their haste to
lay claim to everything from aquifers to wind. In Auckland, a Maori
statutory body, unelected and apparently accountable to no one, is demanding
that ratepayers spend $295 million on a wish list that includes compulsory te
reo in schools and bilingual street signage.

Some of the people behind these claims give the impression
of being intoxicated by a heady cocktail of power and entitlement. Nowhere do
they acknowledge that we have a shared history, a joint stake in the land and a
common interest in its future.

The process is aided by a Waitangi Tribunal whose makeup is fundamentally
flawed. Twelve of the tribunal’s 24 members have iwi affiliations and most of the
others either come from academic backgrounds – hardly a guarantee of
neutrality, given the political leanings of most academics – or have a history
of legal advocacy on behalf of Maori. It would be unnatural if this didn’t
predispose them to sympathise with Maori claims.

What is perhaps most striking about this unseemly scramble
for assets is that it’s based on the false premise that New Zealand consists of
two races, “Maori” and the rest.

I use those inverted commas deliberately, since there is no
legal definition of a Maori. Under a law change in 1974, “Maoriness” became a
question of cultural self-identification. If you feel you are Maori, then you
are.

Many of the most belligerent activists have European
surnames (or did, until they created Maori versions) and decidedly European
features.

The intriguing question is why so many people with a mixture
of European and Maori blood choose to identify exclusively with their Maori
forebears. No matter how much they might wish to, there’s no escaping the fact
that their European ancestors were complicit in the injustices suffered by
their Maori ancestors for which they now demand redress.

This inconvenient irony goes unmentioned in the endless race
debate that saps New Zealand’s energy, sets the minority against the majority
and constantly distracts politicians from the crucial business of ensuring a
prosperous future for all New Zealanders.

1 comment:

Its highly ironic that if the Govt had sold the businesses sometime in the last three years the Govt would be able to smugly say that they had sold three dogs before they went either unprofitable or risky.

Meantime even more smug opponents are celebrating the fact that they continue to own said dogs.. and in the mad world of Govt owned assets excess electricity means price *rises* not falls.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.